“The Future of Football is Feminine”: A Critical Cultural History of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team,focuses on the historical and cultural construction of the U.S. women’s national soccer team. The public and academic discourse that constitutes women’s soccer in the U.S. consistently links the game with the feminist legislation of Title IX, and positions male coaches as benevolent patriarchs who grant young girls and women the right to play. The combination of these two dominant narratives confronts the historical narrative of women’s soccer from an uncritical and celebratory space, which represses and decenters lines of power. I challenge these steadfast discourses by locating this team, and thus, women’s soccer, in the larger cultural frame of neoliberal, postfeminist, post-racial, and sexual politics. Through an examination of U.S. newspapers and magazines, United States Soccer Federation (USSF) and Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) documents, and extensive soccer-specific journals and magazines, I explore the intersection of capitalism, feminism, and racism in women’s professional sport. This research also examines how the media and other corporations have cultivated the U.S. women’s national team and its individual stars, such as Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain, Kristine Lilly, Abby Wambach, and Hope Solo to promote themselves as consumer conduits through which moral and ethical behaviors circulate and influence civil society. Since the mid-1990s, young female soccer players find themselves at an ideological crossroad of individual choice and self-discipline. The soccer field has been promoted as a space of gender and racial inclusion as well as economic and political freedom while subtly reinforcing the exact opposite. Moreover, I examine the historical and ever-shifting landscape of women’s soccer, and how neoliberalism as an economic and cultural theory is central to the use of race, class, gender, and sexual ideologies to develop women’s soccer in the United States.

Emerging out of a tradition of dystopic and apocalyptic cinema, the survivalist film has arisen as a new subgenre owing to a collision of several divergent modes of cinema. While the scholarly discourse has been preoccupied largely with the task of setting up the parameters of this new cinematic line little attention has been paid to unraveling what the new modes of masculine performance within the films mean in the post-9/11 moment in which they have emerged. This paper looks at the ways in which the gendered heroics on the screen are indebted to the slasher and zombie subgenres in offering alternatives to performing and reclaiming masculinity in the modern survivalist film. Looking towards the collapse of society within these films and the historical preoccupation with these film's ancestral sources at moments when masculinity is threatened in new ways, I argue that when society collapses on the screen so too collapses the character's understanding of "proper" gender performance as well as the audiences expectations of appropriate response to this subversion. I find that survivalist films offer a new mode for exploring gender through the ways in which masculinity is performed, received, and reclaimed. Owing largely to the meeting of horror subgenres within these films masculinity can be encountered by the audience in a way that has until now not been possible for the spectator, presenting an opportunity to reevaluate how we recognize and regulate expectations of gender both on and off screen.

<p>Abstract</p><p>Essay in political science, C-level, by Julia Leonsson, spring semester 2007</p><p>Tutor: Susan Marton</p><p>Freedom – The political philosophy of our time?</p><p>An analysis of the ideas of the international debate about</p><p>Chávez socialistic politic</p><p>Since more than 2000 years there has been an ongoing discussion about whether state interference is a good thing or not. Most international organisations on the international political arena are today founded on neoliberal values, and it has developed in to the hegemonic ideology of the world. The socialistic politics of the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez is thereby a somewhat unusual strategy. The purpose of this essay is to examine to what extent the international debate about Chávez socialistic politic can be understood through a neoliberal perspective. My main research question is: Is the international discussion about Chávez socialistic politic imprinted by neoliberal values?</p><p>The methodological approach is a qualitative text analysis and by using an analyse chart, bases on three dimensions, it is possible to analyse the material. The dimensions, which also was the basis of my specified research questions is: the state, the individual and the economy.</p><p>The theoretical foundation of the essay is the neoliberal ideology and my material consists of newspaper articles from six different newspapers.</p><p>I discovered that the topic and dimension most discussed in the articles was the economy. Based on my study the conclusion is that the international debate about Chávez socialistic politic to a large extent can be understood through a neoliberal perspective.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request

This thesis discusses one of the primary questions of the debates on China, the question of the nature of Chinese transformation. It is suggested in this thesis that to fully grasp the transformation of China, we need to contextualize it within global neoliberal transformations since the 1980s. It is also argued that even if the transformation in China has been heavily influenced by global tendencies, we still have to recognize peculiar characteristics of Chinese transformation. Thus, the thesis aims to contribute to the scholarly discussions on the nature of Chinese transformation especially by way of critically engaging with &lsquo / Beijing Consensus&rsquo / , a notion that is relatively new and opens to the scientific debates. In the thesis, a decade-based analysis of the transformation in China is provided. In this regard, this thesis identifies the period between Deng&rsquo / s coming to power in 1978 and his Southern Tour in 1992 as the period of &lsquo / launching of the reforms&rsquo / . It is argued that the reforms introduced in the 1980s are of vital importance in terms of abandoning the legacies of Maoist period and the construction of the institutions of a capitalist market economy in China. On the other hand, the 1990s period that ends with the change of leadership from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao in 2002 is characterized as the period of &lsquo / consolidation of the reforms&rsquo / . It is assumed that the reform drive in the 1990s has a pivotal role for the consolidation of the current configuration of state, labour, capital relations in China.

Med denna uppsats måste jag verkligen betona att jag ökat min förståelse för Takashi Murakami och hans konstnärskap. Gradvis tog jag mig in i hans konstnärskap. Till en början är det väldigt lätt att fastna vid spektakulära uttryck i hans konst och grubblerier kring hur hans varor blivit konst, men glappet däremellan är alldeles för stort för att sådana tankar skall kunna mynna ut i något fruktbart. Men genom att först försöka förstå sig på hans verksamhet mot ljuset av den ekonomiska kontexten framhävdes gradvis detaljerna kring hur hans varor blivit konst. Jag kom fram till att hans konst egentligen handlar om symboler i relation till andra symboler, där spänningen ligger i att Murakamis är beständiga/ fixerade medan de övriga är rörliga/ dynamiska. Utan Murakamis beständiga/ fixerade symboler som retar den så tillsynes naturliga harmonin i det rörliga/ dynamiska hav av övriga ekonomiskt knutna symboler hade jag definitivt inte förstått att dem är rörliga.

This thesis investigates the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) in order to engage debates about neoliberalism in African development policy. In identifying limitations with commentaries of Nepad and pervasive narratives of neoliberalisation, I employ an analytic of governmentality to reinterpret neoliberalisation as the governmental re-management of populations into societies of free, entrepreneurial, self-regulating subjects. Firstly, I investigate how Nepad makes Africa knowable and amenable to technical intervention in the form of “development”, particularly drawing attention to how the African subject is understood and the intimacy between technical solutions and expert diagnosis. Secondly, I explore four initiatives and techniques that attempt to render these rationalities reality. The conclusions elucidate how neoliberalism ought not to be understood as a monolithic, unrolling totality that simply implants itself through coercive power relations, but rather is comprised of a patchwork of rationalities, knowledges and discourses and given effect through prosaic governing practices.

I examine five international investment cases that embrace the neoliberal vision. This economic model provides a new, contested space between the construction of hegemonic globalisations from above and the contestation of these globalisations from below. The first objective is to describe this space. Each ends the same way: the exit of an unwanted foreign investor after intense social mobilisation. The second objective is to show that counter-hegemonic victories are difficult to achieve: the regime relegates the voice of the subaltern to an inconsequential role, limits public interest state projects that may interfere with investor rights, and often includes a compensatory promise to foreign investors irrespective of the host state’s fiscal capacity. The third objective is to demonstrate the ambivalent role of the state in promoting such neoliberal projects, which necessitate that it adopt a more active role in either policing investment or policing society.

In this thesis, I explore the variety of ways museums operate in a neoliberal, global economy. I describe interactions between museums, people, governments and money. These articles examine the different dimensions and connections between these discursive relationships, such as the ways in which museums work for and also work with governments, schools, tourists and local citizens in their communities. Additionally, I discuss my experiences as an anthropologist who is studying institutions controlled by elites. I use Larua Nader's (1969) theory of "studying up," to describe how anthropolotists must be increasingly flexible when researching museums in the age of neoliberalism. I present findings that suggest people working in museums have a heightened sense of awareness of the economy, and I show how they have a working vocabulary of "economic terms" that is ever present. Additionally, I discuss my assumptions that museum professionals no longer feel a sense of personal agency, instead they demonstrate feelings of being "controlled by the market."

This thesis investigates the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) in order to engage debates about neoliberalism in African development policy. In identifying limitations with commentaries of Nepad and pervasive narratives of neoliberalisation, I employ an analytic of governmentality to reinterpret neoliberalisation as the governmental re-management of populations into societies of free, entrepreneurial, self-regulating subjects. Firstly, I investigate how Nepad makes Africa knowable and amenable to technical intervention in the form of “development”, particularly drawing attention to how the African subject is understood and the intimacy between technical solutions and expert diagnosis. Secondly, I explore four initiatives and techniques that attempt to render these rationalities reality. The conclusions elucidate how neoliberalism ought not to be understood as a monolithic, unrolling totality that simply implants itself through coercive power relations, but rather is comprised of a patchwork of rationalities, knowledges and discourses and given effect through prosaic governing practices.